


Things That Tick Are Clocks Or Bombs

by Path



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M, Mobsterswitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:04:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Path/pseuds/Path
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have lived your life stifling down the things deep inside you that threaten to come out. And you succeeded, up until Pernicious Innovator pulled you against him and asked for your hands around his throat. And now you can barely recognize yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things That Tick Are Clocks Or Bombs

**Author's Note:**

> Mobsterswitch version of Rabbit in the Room/The Brink, at varietyshow's suggestion.

It is three o'clock on a Sunday, and you have your hands full.

Your coat sits neatly over one of the crooked chairs here- there's no room on the seat, so it's looped over the back. There is barely a surface in this place that isn't covered in papers, cups, pieced-together gadgets. Sunlight doesn't make it through the window; the blinds are closed, and the glass faces a brick wall anyhow. You are barely aware of what time it is. It could be any time.

You are barely aware because you are nearly weeping with the effort to control yourself. You don't know why you keep coming back to this place. At first, when it was just tea, perhaps it was in some deluded attempt to understand him, to piece him together like his little gadgets and understand what makes him tick. But swiftly, it became something else entirely, these clandestine meetings, and you have to come to terms with the realization that if you have discovered things about Pernicious Innovator, he has learned more about you.

At first it was just your tastes- tea, literature, clothing. Then pain tolerance, thresholds, and how much you could force your body to endure. And now, because you are a foolish man beneath your poised exterior, he is learning about the things you have spent your life trying to extinguish. When they refused to die, you merely denied them sunlight, in the hopes they would not grow.

It is obvious, today, that the vines of the horrid things inside you have grown all the same, and crept into the bricks. You could not pull them down now if you tried. They are too entwined with everything that makes you up. Some ivy types, you understand in the sort of learning you gain from reading as much as you do, and not from any real experience with plants, cannot be removed once they've had a chance to grow. If you want your wall clean, you just burn it.

Your mind is twisted and your jaw slack with the effort not to extract pleasure from this. It is a struggle you are losing fast. Innovator is beneath you. His loose shirt is open, and his thin chest bears the marks of a life lived the wrong way- burns, scars, and many of them so precise and minute that you know how they got there. You can see him, shirtless and slim, tracing the flat back of a scalpel blade down the veins in his arm with the same expression of heady euphoria he's wearing now. In the end, he leaves the vein, and opens instead another grouping of slim numbers into his upper arm. You count the first set you see- seventeen. Above it, thirteen. Eleven. Seven. Prime numbers cut into his body.

You close your eyes and swallow, then take a deep breath. Your heart rate does not slow. You aren't in control of it anymore.

Your hands tighten around his wrists, and he writhes in pleasure. Your chest is heaving shallowly, for all you've tried to control it. Your tie is loose and your vest is open- Innovator's little touches from before he drew you here. He pulled you to him as you moved to leave, once the conversation got too loaded for your tastes and you tried to escape while you could still plead politeness. He pulled you in, and you caged him, his back to the wall, and he placed delicate precise fingers on your tie and pulled you in so you were just a hair away.

"Don't go, Detective," he breathed, and his watery violet eyes were wide and nervous, "please. Please." And your heart shook in your chest, and air shuddered.

"I really... I really must," you said, voice barely audible with the strain of keeping yourself away from him. His cheekbones were made of glass and his hair was a dark cloud framing his face. His fingers on your tie trembled. How could he be such a monster, how could he do the things he did, and still be a victim? Why did he have to shiver with anticipation or fear when you had his back to a wall, nevermind that he put you there? Surely he was doing it intentionally. Surely this was just to manipulate you further, Innovator's cruel mind games.

But when your fingers found the back of his neck, his shiver was not faked. You wrapped the other hand around his wrist, taking it from your tie, and you placed it against the wall, and then you pulled him to you, the few inches of difference, and the shaking eagerness as your lips met couldn't be faked either. You are cursing yourself inwardly for letting yourself get drawn in, but the effort to pull back now is so great that you're not sure you could muster it. Exhausting. You feel your heart would simply snuff out.

And now you're above him, his wrists gripped in yours and his thin body pressing into yours wherever he can. His chest strains towards you, but you keep yourself a careful distance away. You are beginning to manipulate him in turn and it frightens you, and somewhere inside yourself, you pull a piece away and divorce it from your actions. That'll be the piece you hold up and remain at work, through the rest of your life. That one piece will have to suffice. You're not sure you'll be able to recognize the rest of you when you're done here, and the thought makes your legs weak.

You are both silent, except for gasps of air and Innovator's faint moans. Those sounds eat into your heart and erode your control. You can feel it slipping from you and you grasp for it. It has been the thing that kept you sane for so many years, you can't just let it go. That control got you on the force. That control kept you in your place. That control made walls around the things inside you that just wouldn't die, and it strangled them and kept them in. But it didn't kill them.

"Please," he whispers, "please." His thin arms, sleeves rolled up to bare the wrists, push against yours in a ghost of an escape attempt. It takes no effort to hold him down, and that knowledge thrills through your veins. You get both his thin wrists in one hand, and trail the other down him. You close your eyes. His skin is the only warmth in the room, and you can feel every rib. Your resolve is sinking fast, shot down by his wrists easily kept in one hand, by the way he gasps when you touch him. And then he speaks again, one last time, and your control, your carefully crafted defense, is just gone.

"Around my neck?" His eyes are wide and violet and wanting, and the words sink into you and keep going. "Detective, please, will you-" And you don't wait longer, you can't. The ivy inside you races in an instant through your veins until it is you, and you're nothing but the things you held down. And suddenly twisted, it's those things, those horrid monstrous things you hated and wanted all your life, that are you, and holding down and strangling something else.

His body twitches and he begins to struggle.

It is three o'clock on a Sunday, and your hands are wrapped around Pernicious Innovator's throat. You are no longer yourself. Faintly, in the back of your mind as your entire body thrums like a strummed guitar string, you wonder who will have to burn you down to rid the world of you. But you do not think it for long.


End file.
